A preschool director once relayed to me an observation she made at her community center. She watched as a mother plucked her child from the waters of the pool at the end of his swimming lesson, quickly dried him and dressed him right on the deck, and then delivered him, minutes later, to his karate class. She wondered at how passive his role in the whole exchange was, as though he was merely a passenger on the high-speed train that was his life.

I often wonder what other people see in the art being created in an early childhood classroom. What do they make of these splashes of paint and collages covered with glue and seemingly random bits and bobs?

That was one of the big takeaways from my conversation with Emily Oster, researcher, author, and mother. As an economist at Brown University, Emily explores the science of making good decisions based on the data. In her newest book, Cribsheet, she explores how to apply that science to the decisions that face us as parents.

The debate over the roles of play and academics in kindergarten is not new. While my first response to this tired argument is always that it is a false dichotomy, a more specific challenge has recently entered the arena and therefore deserves a more specific response.

Just in time for the biggest gift-giving season of the year, the American Academy of Pediatrics released toy guidelines that suggest that high-tech trends are promoting toys for children that are over-stimulating, ineffective when it comes to development, and in some cases, actually lead to skill delays.